Welcome to the page to nominate titles for Panda 2012 Mature Readers. Make sure you always post your review above the latest review and use the following format:
Username-Date-Title-Author-Review
Semi-finalists:
Anya's ghost-- Vera Brosgol, (2011) Booklist starred Graphic Novel Russian-immigrant ghost story
Why we broke up : novel- Daniel Handler ; art by Maira Kalman (2011) Fiction-Romance Printz honor 2012 Booklist starred
Midnight in Peking— Paul French (2011) Nonfiction, murder mystery China-related (Beijing 1937)
The House of Silk – Anthony Horowitz (2012) Fiction Crime & mystery Sherlock Holmes
In the Sea there Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda - 2011 – biographical fiction Booklist Afghanistan
Rot & Ruin, Jonathan Mayberry (2010) Zombies Fiction. Survival Fiction.
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School — Alexandra Robbins (2011) NonFiciton
The Night Circus-Erin Morgenstern (2011) Fiction-Romance/Fantasy Alex Award 2012
Between shades of gray- Ruta Sepetys (2011) Horn Book starred Historical fiction
Boys don't cry-Blackman, Malorie (2010)--The Guardian Fiction
Annabel-Winter, Kathleen (2011) Kirkus Fiction Gender issues Canadian
Tiger's Wife-Obreht, Téa (2011) Fiction (several best books of the year lists)
Balkan
iBoy, Kevin Brooks (2010) SF Gangs fiction Internet fiction reluctant readers British
Robopocalypse : a novel / Daniel H. Wilson.(Alex Award 2012)
Archos, a powerful artificial intelligence, takes on the persona of a shy human boy and begins to take over the world's technology and turn it against humanity, launching a robot war that no one seems to be able to contain or stop.
SLJ: Gr 8 Up-This adventure, set in Australia, is one for the art crowd. Lucy, Jazz, and Daisy plan to celebrate graduation by staying out all night. And while they're at it, Lucy is determined to meet Shadow, a mysterious graffiti artist who has tagged the city with his soulful works. Jazz is set on finding Poet, Shadow's partner and the wordsmith of his wall art. Daisy just wants boyfriend Dylan to remember that it's her birthday. Dealing with his dyslexia by quitting school, Ed has lost his job in a paint store and is talked into robbing the art wing of the high school this particular night with Leo and Dylan. They decide to hang out with the girls until it's time for the heist. Ed takes Lucy on a search for Shadow and along the way they visit a number of his paintings around the city. Chapters that alternate between Lucy and Ed (who, unbeknownst to Lucy, is Shadow) rely heavily on art-themed metaphor to describe the encroaching darkness, city scenes, traffic lights, and impending dawn. Part gallery tour, part crime caper, and part romance, Graffiti Moon is an artsy spin on the common young adult theme of self-discovery. The references to artists and specific works may intimidate readers who have little related knowledge, but it might also nudge them to learn about Vermeer and others. The aesthetic tone of the story is punctuated with comic relief and some coarse language. While Lucy's and Ed's inner dialogues sometimes seem unrealistically metaphorical, readers will appreciate the original and sympathetic characters. A paint-covered thumbs up!-Karen Elliott, Grafton High School, WI
iBoy, Kevin Brooks (2011) SF Gangs fiction Internet fiction Kirkus Review starred (October 1, 2011) Tom Harvey's world is upended after he's hit by a smartphone thrown from 30 stories up. Living with his grandmother in the projects known as Crow Town, a grim, sprawling urban jungle where drug-dealing gangs rule by intimidation, Tom keeps his head down and dreams of turning his childhood friendship with Lucy into something more. That life ends when, waking from surgery, he's told that parts of the iPhone fused with his brain and can't be removed. That fusion endows Tom with powers that give new meaning to "hacking." It feels exhilarating to apply his new powers to paying back a local gang that carried out a brutal sexual assault on Lucy, but revenge can't bridge the gulf between him and Lucy or heal her psychological wounds. Using his powers is changing Tom; he'd like to stop; yet against an unscrupulous enemy that's utterly amoral, don't his moral scruples amount to weakness? Those aiming to attract the elusive teen male to teen fiction have no better ally than English novelist Brooks, whose lean, suspenseful thrillers feature compelling heroes facing tough choices, and this is no exception (Being, 2007, etc.). This classic superhero plot, at once cutting-edge science fiction and moral fable, is guaranteed to keep even fiction-averse, reluctant readers on the edge of their seats. (Science fiction. 14 & up)
Rot & Ruin, Jonathan Mayberry (2010) Zombies Fiction. Survival Fiction.
Booklist (October 15, 2010 (Vol. 107, No. 4))
Grades 9-12. It’s been 14 years since First Night, when the dead came back to life. Six billion people have died (and reanimated) since then, and America has collapsed into isolated communities living within the great “Rot and Ruin.” Benny is 15, which means it’s time to get a job or face cut rations, but his general laziness leaves him with only one employment option: join his stuffy, sword-swinging, Japanese half-brother, Tom, as an apprentice bounty hunter. This means heading beyond the gates to slice and dice “zoms,” but Benny quickly begins to see the undead in a new light—as well as realizing that Tom is much more than he ever let on. The plot is driven by an evil bounty-hunter rival and the cruel games he plays, but Maberry has more than gore on his mind. The chief emotion here is sadness, and the book plays out like an extended elegy for a lost world. Tom’s a bit too perfect and his pontification too extended, but this is nevertheless an impressive mix of meaning and mayhem. The House of Silk – Anthony Horowitz (2012) Crime & mystery The first official new Sherlock Holmes mystery, Washinton Post, Michael Dirda: ““The House of Silk” is an altogether terrific period thriller and one of the best Sherlockian pastiches of our time.”
Nadine Rosevear - February 15, 2012 - There Is no Dog- Meg Rosoff, 2011 Fantasy
Booklist starred (November 15, 2011 (Vol. 108, No. 6))
Grades 9-12. Have you ever wondered why there are earthquakes and hurricanes? Why plans fail and lovers break up? How an omnipotent deity lets evil occur in the world? Would it help if I told you God is a teenage boy? That’s the premise of Printz-winner Rosoff’s new novel. Long story short, Mona, the mother of Bob (aka God), wins Earth in a poker game. What mother doesn’t want to see her son get ahead? So Bob gets the job In the Beginning, but like so many teenage boys he often can’t see past his nether regions. And besides, he’s a bit thick and won’t buckle down, so fortunately the overworked Mr. B. has been designated as Bob’s companion/assistant. Think Arthur (Dudley Moore) and his butler (John Gielgud). Then Bob falls for Lucy, a beautiful zoo worker, and Mr. B. knows all hell is going to break loose. It happens every time Bob gets involved with a human. Wildly inventive and laugh-out-loud funny, the story is told from the points of view of various characters: long-suffering Mr. B., virginal Lucy, dingbat Mona, and, of course, petulant, powerful, pissant Bob. In many ways, the book’s parts add up to more than its sum, but it is not often that a book comes along that is both arch and thoughtful, silly and smart. This one’s not quite like anything else out there.
Karen Gockley, February 8, 2012 - The Boy Who Loved Batman: a memoir: the true story of how a comic book obsessed kid conquered Hollywood to bring the Dark Knight to the silver screen. Michael Uslan. 2011. BL - Comic book feel, childhood memories leading to making the Batman movies...
Science Fair Season: 12 kids, a robot named Scorch, and what it takes to win. Judy Dutton. 2011
The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) has a top prize of $50,000, with a total of $4 million in prizes available to high-school students for their achievements in fields from physics to behavioral science. A baking soda volcano isn’t going to cut it. Not even drug-sniffing cockroaches make rank. Dutton profiles six promising students—including a horse trainer, a leper, and possibly the youngest nuclear physicists in the country—on the road to ISEF 2009 and discusses (to some extent, demystifying) the work of five hall-of-fame competitors in previous years. With warmth, wit, and a sense of awe, Dutton conveys the students’ dedication and curiosity, dissects their motivations, sifts through their pasts, and breaks down the science behind their innovations into plain, palatable English. As these kids strive for scholarships, take meetings with Homeland Security, and earn the ire of large corporations, it’s easy to forget that they’re teenagers. Science Fair Season humanizes them while inspiring and firing the imagination of readers along for the ride.
Kamchatka. Marcelo Figeuras. 2010
A novel that offers an adventure story about a young boy forced to square fantasy against reality. The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School by Alexandra Robbins, published by Hyperion (ISBN 9781401302023).
The fascinating psychology behind popularity and outsiderdom is illuminated through the roles of Popular Bitch, Gamer, Band Geek, and others. Being excluded doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you - outsiders often succeed.
Library JOURNAL:
VERDICT An excellent overview of the complex social environment of high school, told in an accessible and often humorous and touching manner. High school students as well as adults, especially those who are or were part of the "cafeteria fringe," will enjoy this book. Very highly recommended.-Mark Bay, Univ. of the Cumberlands Lib., Williamsburg, KY (c) Copyright 2011.
Starcrossed. Josephine Angelini. 2011 (with a sequel out in May)
The first time Helen sees Lucas Delos in her Nantucket high-school hallway, she wants to kill him—literally. The Three Furies that have haunted her dreams harass her until she attacks this gorgeous new guy on campus, an act that introduces her to the rest of the Delos family and gradually serves to unveil her multiple talents—superhuman strength, the ability to fly, and an electrical charge that packs a wallop—as well as an unknown enemy determined to kill her. In Angelini’s debut, based on the Greek myth of Helen of Troy, Helen’s true heritage and Lucas’ large, boisterous, and very dangerous extended family both come into play. Angelini weaves mythology and everyday high-school life into a tangled fantasy of star-crossed lovers. The riveting plot twists and turns as the myth’s destiny translates into present-day terrors, dreams, and hopelessness, and its execution is seamless. An intentionally less-than-satisfying ending will only prompt readers to hope for a sequel that reunites Helen, Lucas, and their bizarre yet fascinating families. Truth or Dare: 21 tales of heartbreak and happiness.(Short Stories)
Perhaps the whole of life is like one big game of ‘Truth or Dare,’ says editor Miles in the introduction to this short story collection. The 21 fascinating tales dare to portray teens accurately and truthfully regardless of the consequences, and they run the gamut. From life and death to love and sex, both gay and straight; from parental neglect to best friend betrayal; from tweeting to the retelling of a Bible story—these stories will reach out to all teens. Popular or pariah, privileged or poor, readers will see themselves somewhere in this wide array of characters and situations. Both YA and adult writers are featured, including such well-known authors as Gary Soto, Ellen Wittlinger, and A. M. Holmes, as well as a few who are newly introduced (Heidi Kling and Sara Wilkinson). Together, they challenge teen readers to face and embrace life with all its triumphs and travails.
The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens (non-fiction)
Nadine Rosevear - February 6, 2012 - In the Sea there Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda - 2011 - biographical fiction
Booklist (July 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 21)
Based on a true story, Geda’s novel faithfully retells the torturous life of Afghan Enaiatollah—Enaiat—Akbari as, beginning at age 10, he proceeds from one dire situation to another in hopes of finding a new life free from Taliban rule. His plight is briskly as well as briefly told, yet in it there’s no shortage of heart-breaking trials to be faced as Enaiat journeys through Pakistan and Iran to Turkey and Greece before finding political asylum in Italy when he is 15. On one page he’s doing back-breaking labor to repay debts, and on the next he’s spending days inside the false bottom of a truck dangerously crossing a border. Throughout, firing AK-47s boom and blast. Enaiat’s daring adventure is ideally suited for young adults, but older readers will find in it a deeper layer of investigation of the humanity of strangers and the power of family. If Enaiat’s memory eventually seems muddled and fragmented, so that the book must be called fiction, the truth of his experience remains.
Gourley-24 Jan 2012--The Night Circus-Erin Morgenstern (2011) Fiction-Romance-Fantasy
Alex Award 2012 Booklist starred (May 15, 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 18)) This big and—no, not bulky—compelling first novel ushers in a menacing tone with its first sentence: The circus arrives without warning. Why would a circus arrive so quietly in town, and why would anyone need warning about this particular one? The time span here is 30 years, from 1873 to 1903, and the settings range from America to Europe. To a famous magician is delivered a little girl who, as it turns out, is his child, and fortunately for his future, she is possessed of magical powers. As it also happens, this magician has an archrival, who, in the face of the first magician’s jackpot in the form of his little girl, seeks a young person for him to train to rival her. What the two magicians did not anticipate, as the years pass and the two young people, the girl and the boy whom the second magician found, are honed in their specialty for performance’s sake and to outplay the other one, is that the young persons, when of an age, would meet and, surprising or not to the reader, fall in love. How will their destiny play out now? With appeal for readers not particularly geared to fantasy but who plainly enjoy an unusual and well-drawn story, this one will make a good crossover suggestion.
Gourley-24 Jan 2012--Why we broke up : novel- Daniel Handler ; art by Maira Kalman (2011) Fiction-Romance
Printz honor 2012
Grades 9-12. This novel may sound like another tale of boy meets girl, but, folks, it’s all in the delivery. In faltering pitter-patter dialogue and thick, gushy, grasping-for-words paragraphs, Handler takes a tired old saw, the romance between senior basketball cocaptain Ed Slaterton and junior cinephile Min Green, and injects us into the halting, breathless, disbelieving, horny, and nervous minds of two teens who feel “different” only in how they define themselves in contrast to each other—that dumbstruck, anthropological joy of introducing foreign films to a dude schooled only in layups, and vice versa. The story is told from Min’s perspective, a bittersweet diatribe of their breakup arranged around objects (a matchbox, a bottle cap, a dish towel, an—ahem—condom wrapper) of varying importance that she intends on returning to him. (Kalman’s full-color drawings of these objects were not available for review.) It is fitting that the chapters center upon these items; the story itself feels like blurry photos, snippets of stray recordings—all the more powerful because of how they evoke truth more than any mere relaying of facts. Yes, the relationship breaks apart like a predictable song, but Handler’s genius is to make us hear those minor-key notes as if they were playing on our first—and last—dates, too. In the mood to break additional hearts? Pair this with Pete Hautman’s The Big Crunch (2011). HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Yes, Handler is mostly known to the younger set as Mr. Snicket, but this effort finds the perfect spot between his youth and adult novels, a fact born out by the high-caliber promotional plans.
Gourley-24 Jan 2012-Where Things Come Back- John Corey Whaley (2011)
William C. Morris Award 2012; Printz 2012 Fiction Booklist (July 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 21)) Grades 9-12. An answer to complaints about simplistic YA problem fiction, this debut novel, set in Lily, Arkansas, takes on the whole small town with alternating viewpoints, beginning with the first-person narrative of Cullen, 17, and moving on to a huge cast of friends, enemies, family members, lovers, and neighbors. In a parallel plotline, Benton, 18, fails as a missionary in Ethiopia (“passing out food, water, and Christ”) and, after returning to college in the U.S., commits suicide, setting off a chain of interconnected, unexpected events. What will hold readers most is the moving story of Cullen’s beloved younger brother, who suddenly goes missing, leading to mystery, heartbreak, and an astonishing resolution on the very last page. Whaley’s numerous themes range from religion to Internet technology to the environment, and a wry subplot about the so-called sighting of a long-extinct Lazarus woodpecker brings levity, as Lily’s residents try to capitalize on the new tourist trade with creations such as the “Lazarus burger.” An intriguing, memorable offering teens will want to discuss.
cindycolson-20 Jan 2012-Boys don't cry-Blackman, Malorie (2011)--The Guardian
Fiction
It's a striking opening: Dante is waiting for his A-level results to arrive in the post, but what he gets instead is an ex-girlfriend on the doorstop with a baby she says is his. One event offers him a future at university; the other, since the mother is about to dump the baby on him, leads to the death of all his dreams.
It's an immensely readable book, as you would expect from Malorie Blackman, and the account of how Dante comes to terms with fatherhood and his responsibilities is genuinely moving, while staying on the right side of sentimentality. Along the way he also accepts his brother's orientation, though at a terrible cost.
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-Blue Nights-Didion, Joan (2011)--Entertainment Weekly
Nonfiction (essays)
There is no magical thinking left at all, not a shred of it, in Blue Nights, Didion's ragged and self-pitiless slog back into the bowels of loss in memory of her daughter. ''The way I write is who I am, or have become,'' Didion explained in Magical Thinking, an exquisitely chiseled book built with passion and shaped by the author's raw need to keep up momentum as an escape hatch from grief. Now, in Blue Nights, she writes as a woman aged and broken by what she has endured these past several years. Her energy is gone. Her language, while still that distinctive Didion incantation of self-absorption and piercing perception, is variable. Her attention wanders from the memory of bridal flowers in Quintana's hair to reminiscences about fancy dinner plates in the home of fancy friends. To say that Blue Nights has little of Magical Thinking's polish is to state a fascinating, telling fact, not to offer a criticism. What wafts off the pages of this haunting memento mori are undistilled, profoundly human expressions of fatigue, fear, dignity, regret, and vulnerability that are almost — but not quite — under the author's control.--Lisa Schwarzbaum
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-The Sense of an Ending- Barnes, Julian (2011)--Guardian
2011 Man Booker Prize Winner
Fiction Like so many of Barnes's narrators, Tony Webster is resigned to his ordinariness; even satisfied with it, in a bloody-minded way. In one light, his life has been a success: a career followed by comfortable retirement, an amiable marriage followed by amicable divorce, a child seen safely into her own domestic security. On harsher inspection, "I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was." Barnes is brutally incisive on the diminishments of age: now that the sense of his own ending is coming into focus, Tony apprehends that "the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss", that he has already experienced the first death: that of the possibility of change. But like all of us, he has carried his youth inside him into adulthood, fixed in vivid memory. Looming largest in his personal mythology is his brilliant, tragic, Camus-reading schoolfriend Adrian (another echo ofNothing to Be Frightened Of here: in that book Barnes remembers a similar friend by the fitting but unlikely name of Alex Brilliant). It is a solicitor's letter informing him that, 40 years on, he has been left Adrian's diary in a will, that sets Tony to examining what he thinks his life has been.--Justine Jordan
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-Annabel-Winter, Kathleen (2011)--Kirkus
Fiction
In a remote coastal town in Newfoundland in the 1970s, a young person of mixed gender struggles for identity, acceptance and understanding. Joining a select group of novels including Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (2002) and Alan Friedman's Hermaphrodeity (1972), Winter's affecting first novel is the story of Wayne Blake, who is subjected to special corrective surgery as a newborn, raised as a boy and given injections and hormone pills to maintain his masculine traits. His mother, Jacinta, a cosmopolitan-minded outsider from the city of St. John's, is torn over quashing his female qualities and interests but wants even less to go against the wishes of his closed-off father, Treadway, a trapper away for months at a time. The Montreal-based Winter, a native of Newfoundland, possesses a rare blend of lyrical brilliance, descriptive power and psychological and philosophical insight. Her way with fate and sadness recalls The World According to Garp, without the cute irony. A compelling, gracefully written novel about mixed gender that sheds insight as surely as it rejects sensationalism. This book announces the arrival of a major writer.
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-Cat's Table-Ondaatje, Michael (2011)--New York Times
Fiction
In “The Cat’s Table,” Ondaatje seems to lead the reader on a journey through three deeply submerged weeks in his own memory — from the year 1954, when, at age 11, he traveled on the ocean liner Oronsay from Colombo, in what was then Ceylon, to England, a passage that would lead him from his past to his future self. As the novel opens, prominent passengers are granted seats at the captain’s table, but young Michael (nicknamed Mynah) and the two boys he befriends, Cassius (a troublemaker) and Ramadhin (a contemplative asthmatic), are relegated to a table of dubious characters: a mute tailor, a retired ship dismantler, a pianist who has “hit the skids,” a botanist and a lady who hides pigeons in the pockets of her jacket, and reads thrillers in her deck chair, flinging them overboard when they bore her.... Not all the mysteries Ondaatje explores in his account of Mynah’s sea passage — revisited in adulthood from the remove of decades and from another continent — have clear resolutions, nor do they need them. Uncertainty, Ondaatje shows, is the unavoidable human condition, the gel that changes the light on the lens, altering but not spoiling the image.--Liesl Schillinger
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-Half-Blood Blues-Edugyan, Esi (2011)--Globe and Mail Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta to Ghanaian immigrant parents
Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction (Canadian--2011)
Historical fiction
Set in Baltimore, Berlin and Paris,Half-Blood Blues spans from just after the Great War to the 1990s, but centres on the months leading up to the occupation of Paris. It chronicles the increasingly deadly trials of an interracial jazz band in which the lead musician, a German of African descent, is arrested by the Nazis. Half-Blood Blues can be compared to a jazz symphony with discrete movements, shifting moods and a complex chorus of human and instrumental voices: It swings between present and past, North and South, East and West, black and white, art and violence, war and peace.--Donna Bailey Nurse
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Tiger's Wife-Obreht, Téa (2011) born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States
-Booklist Fiction Not even Obreht’s place on the New Yorker’s current “20 under 40” list of exceptional writers will prepare readers for the transporting richness and surprise of this gripping novel of legends and loss in a broken land. Drawing on the former Yugoslavia’s fabled past and recent bloodshed, Belgrade-born Obreht portrays two besieged doctors. Natalia is on an ill-advised “good will” medical mission at an orphanage on what is suddenly the “other side,” now that war has broken out, when she learns that her grandfather, a distinguished doctor forced out of his practice by ethnic divides, has died far from home. She is beset by memories, particularly of her grandfather taking her to the zoo to see the tigers. We learn the source of his fascination in mesmerizing flashbacks, meeting the village butcher, the deaf-mute Muslim woman he married, and a tiger who escaped the city zoo after it was bombed by the Germans. Of equal mythic mystery is the story of the “deathless man.” Moments of breathtaking magic, wildness, and beauty are paired with chilling episodes in which superstition overrides reason; fear and hatred smother compassion; and inexplicable horror rules. Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance. — Donna Seaman
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-The Tiger--Vaillant, John (2010) -Booklist NonFiction Set in Russia’s Maritime Territory, Vaillant’s story concerns a tiger of the endangered Amur subspecies that killed three hunters in 1997. Expanding from the incidents’ central facts, Vaillant’s narrative explores humans’ relationship with predatory animals in general, with the Amur tiger as the specific example. Literary, folkloric, and scientific sources combine into a deeply sensitive depiction of the tiger’s adaptation to its forested, mountainous, and wintry environment. As he recounts how Russians such as the hunters in question also attempt to extract a living from the taiga, possibly including illegal poaching of the tiger, Vaillant posits the tiger’s thoughts about the competition, inferring its intelligence from a conservation warden’s investigation into the cases of the unfortunate hunters, who were felled in ambush-style attacks. Interest in Vaillant’s work, which climaxes in the warden’s pursuit of the deadly tiger, will partake of humans’ instinctual fear of large carnivores, the modern imperative to preserve them from extinction, and readers of Vaillant’s //The Golden Spruce// (2005), a positively reviewed, deep-drilling work, also about the nexus between humans and the natural world. — Gilbert Taylor I have read both of the above and highly recommend--see blog post: http://blogs.wab.edu/greensky/2011/12/13/lao-hu/
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-The Revolver--Sedgwick, Marcus (2010) a British author and illustrator as well as a musician. -Booklist Historical-Mystery Fiction Grades 7-10. Sedgwick’s historical mystery, set in the Arctic Circle in 1899 and 1910, makes good use of the word chilling. Outside their remote Scandinavian village, Sig’s father dies of exposure after trying to rush home across a frozen lake. The reason for his carelessness becomes apparent to Sig when a hulking beast of a man arrives at their tiny shack with a Colt revolver, demanding his share of a stolen wealth of gold. But Sig has his own Colt hidden in the storeroom, and some very pressing questions. Who is this brute at the door? Is there really a hidden treasure? And, most importantly, can he bring himself to use that revolver to save himself and his family? As the claustrophobic tension in the Arctic cabin mounts, Sedgwick doles out bits of backstory set a decade earlier in the Alaska gold rush, and the climax reveals that there hasn’t been a single superfluous detail in the intricate, freezer-burn buildup. A carefully crafted story effectively rigidified by taut plotting and the crystalline atmospherics of its isolated setting. — Ian Chipman
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Between shades of gray-Sepetys, Ruta (2011) -Horn Book starred Historical fiction
In 1939, the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic nations, which then disappeared from maps, not to reappear until 1990. Teachers, librarians, musicians, artists, writers, business owners, doctors, lawyers, and servicemen were considered anti-Soviet and sent into exile. Esther Hautzig told this story in her seminal 1968 memoir The Endless Steppe; Sepetys's even starker novel is more extreme in its depiction of deprivation and suffering. When in June 1941 the Soviet secret police show up at fifteen-year-old Lina Vilkas's Lithuania home and throw Lina, her younger brother, and their mother onto a train, a decade-long nightmare begins. "Like matchsticks in a small box," forty-six people were crammed into their car, "a cage on wheels, maybe a rolling coffin" bound for the vast nothingness of Siberia. So begins a human drama calling forth the best and worst of human behaviors -- courage, anger, fear, confusion, little kindnesses, and egregious selfishness. The bald man with the broken leg whines and complains, while the librarian organizes the children and tells stories, and all along the way Lina's mother keeps her family together. Sepetys creates complicated characters: there's more to the bald man than whining and complaining, and the young NKVD guard Nikolai proves not to be the monster Lina considers him. Two excellent maps and an informative author's note round out a haunting chronicle, demonstrating that even in the heart of darkness "love is the most powerful army." dean Schneider
Gourley- 9 Jan 2012-Blink & Caution-Wynne-Jones, Tim (2011) English–Canadian author Horn Book (March/April, 2011) Crime Fiction
"It's as if you always knew something like this would happen to you one day...You'd stumble on to something, and instead of running away from it, you'd pick it up and run with it, follow it to the end." While lurking in a Toronto hotel hallway, hunting for room-service remains to eat for breakfast, a street kid who calls himself Blink happens upon a high-profile kidnapping in progress -- or is it a fake kidnapping in progress? Blink's story, told in compelling second-person narration, alternates and then intersects with that of another runaway, Caution -- "She was the one who came up with the name Caution for herself. Caution, as in Slippery When Wet...Caution, as in Toxic." Both teens have opted for the gritty life of the streets over trouble at home. (Blink is running from domestic violence; Caution from guilt over an accidental shooting death.) Though it loses focus in the end, the crime-drama element of the novel, involving a dispute over corporate uranium mining on Indian-owned land, has enough suspense and action to keep readers interested while they forge a connection with the main characters, whose relationship deepens as they help each other survive immediate dangers as well as the aftereffects of past trauma. christine m. heppermann
Gourley-9 Jan 2011-Chime-Billingsley, Franny (2011) Booklist starred (February 1, 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 11)) Supernatural Fiction
Grades 8-12. Since her stepmother’s recent death, 17-year-old Briony Larkin knows that if she can keep two secrets—that she is a witch and that she is responsible for the accident that left Rose, her identical twin, mentally compromised—and remember to hate herself always, no other harm will befall her family in their Swampsea parsonage at the beginning of the twentieth century. The arrival of Mr. Clayborne, a city engineer, and his university-dropout son, Eldric, makes Briony’s task difficult. Clayborne’s plan to drain the swamp has made the Old Ones unhappy, particularly the Boggy Mun, who has plagued the village’s children with swamp cough in retaliation. When Rose’s lingering illness turns into a cough, Briony knows that she must do whatever it takes, even revealing her secrets, to save her sister. While thwarting the advances of an arsenic-addicted suitor, Briony must also deny her feelings for Eldric, even as he helps her solve the puzzle that has become her life. Exploring the powers of guilt and redemption, Billingsley (The Folk Keeper, 1999) has crafted a dark, chilling yet stunning world. Briony’s many mysteries and occasional sardonic wit make her a force to be reckoned with. Exquisite to the final word.
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Paper covers rock-by Hubbard, Jenny (2011)
Booklist starred (July 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 21)
Fiction
Grades 9-12. At the beginning of his junior year of high school, Alex loses a good friend to an accidental—and drunken—death, and by the end of that first semester, he has lost his moral innocence as well. After Alex’s friend dies, he retreats emotionally while also allowing his new, young, and pretty English teacher to coax out his poetic abilities. Meanwhile, Glenn, another student and former friend, tortures Alex with doubts about Alex’s own motives related to both the dead boy and the English teacher, encouraging Alex to question his very self. Although Alex knows that his admiration for the teacher is fanciful and not connected to the fact that she may have witnessed certain events related to the death, he recognizes that he is socially outclassed by the powerful Glenn. Can Alex muster the will to counter Glenn's manipulations to oust the teacher? Both plotting and characters are thoroughly crafted in this stellar first novel. The poetry that Hubbard produces from Alex’s pen is brilliant, and the prose throughout is elegant in its simplicity. Although the novel takes place in the early 1980s, it could indeed unfold at almost any time, and its boarding-school setting is specific yet accessible to readers in any school setting. Reminiscent of John Knowles’ classic coming-of-age story, A Separate Peace (1959), this novel introduces Hubbard as a bright light to watch on the YA literary scene.
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Anya's ghost--Brosgol, Vera (2011) (born August 1984 in Russia) is a cartoonist and a graduate in Classical Animation of Sheridan College in Canada. She lives in Portland, Oregon
Graphic Novel
Grades 7-12. Like Hope Larson’s Mercury (2010), Brosgol’s spooky, polished debut offers something that’s still too rare in comics: a realistic, contemporary teenage girl’s story. Growing up with her single Russian mother and younger brother, Anya works hard to fit in, and she distances herself from nerdy, heavily accented Dima, another Russian immigrant at her school. On a shortcut to school, Anya tumbles into a well, where a pile of bones swirls into the visible ghost of a young girl, Emily. When Anya is rescued, Emily comes along and becomes a constant companion, helping Anya cheat on tests and talk to crushes. With expert pacing and detail, Brosgol perfectly calibrates the subtle shifts from Anya and Emily’s sunny, BFF bonding into the nightmarish reality that Emily has a terrifying agenda. Working in a clean-lined, cartoon style and an appropriately moody, bruiselike palette of purples and blacks, Brosgol uses clever panel arrangements and shifting close-up and aerial perspectives to amplify the action and emotion, from Anya’s initial elation to her primal terror. The story of a teen who worries about appearing “fresh off the boat” makes this a natural companion to Gene Luen Yang’s Printz Award winner, American Born Chinese (2006), and the contrast between everyday high-school concerns and supernatural horror add even further, broad appeal. New fans will hope for more from this talented newcomer.
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Feynman-Ottaviani, Jim
Horn Book (September/October, 2011)
Graphic Novel-Biography
Richard Feynman was a brilliant theoretical physicist and an individualist of the first order. He worked at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb and won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics; yet he spent two years designing and teaching a freshman physics course at Caltech and turned down staggeringly lucrative offers from rival universities because the money, he said, would "make me unhappy, and I wouldn't be able to do any physics." He was married three times; played the frigideira in a samba band in Brazil; studied art; hung out at topless bars and at Esalen. Everything he did, he did with exuberance and a sense of play. The first-person graphic novel format is ideal for telling Feynman's story. We witness young Feynman struggling with mathematical concepts until he begins to see them in 3D. Feynman talks about his affinity for women, but we hardly need to be told: in panel after panel we see him noticing them, or watch a scene through his eyes in which the women are vividly drawn while the men fade to invisibility. Ottaviani and Myrick do a spectacular job presenting their remarkable subject -- achieving a kind of Vulcan mind-meld with Feynman, we come to know him so well -- even unto clear explanations of complex physics. Their enthusiasm infuses every aspect of the book, from the riveting opening scene of Feynman lecturing while a weighted pendulum whooshes toward his head to the aptly spirited and opinionated bibliography. martha v. parravano
Gourley-9 Jan 2012- Swamplandia! -- Russell, Karen (2011)
Fiction
Russell’s lavishly imagined and spectacularly crafted first novel sprang from a story in her highly praised collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006). Swamplandia! is a shabby tourist attraction deep in the Everglades, owned by the Bigtree clan of alligator wrestlers. When Hilola, their star performer, dies, her husband and children lose their moorings, and Swamplandia! itself is endangered as audiences dwindle. The Chief leaves. Brother Kiwi, 17, sneaks off to work at the World of Darkness, a new mainland amusement park featuring the “rings of hell.” Otherworldly sister Osceola, 16, vanishes after falling in love with the ghost of a young man who died while working for the ill-fated Dredge and Fill Campaign in the 1930s. It’s up to Ava, 13, to find her sister, and her odyssey to the Underworld is mythic, spellbinding, and terrifying. Russell’s powers reside in her profound knowledge of the great imperiled swamp, from its alligators and insects, floating orchids and invasive “strangler” melaleuca trees to the tragic history of its massacred indigenous people and wildlife. Ravishing, elegiac, funny, and brilliantly inquisitive, Russell’s archetypal swamp saga tells a mystical yet rooted tale of three innocents who come of age through trials of water, fire, and air.
Make sure you always post your review above the latest review and use the following format:
Username-Date-Title-Author-Review
Semi-finalists:
Anya's ghost-- Vera Brosgol, (2011)Booklist starred
Graphic Novel
Russian-immigrant
ghost story
Why we broke up : novel- Daniel Handler ; art by Maira Kalman (2011)
Fiction-Romance
Printz honor 2012
Booklist starred
Midnight in Peking— Paul French (2011)
Nonfiction, murder mystery
China-related (Beijing 1937)
The House of Silk – Anthony Horowitz (2012)
Fiction
Crime & mystery
Sherlock Holmes
In the Sea there Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda - 2011 –
biographical fiction
Booklist
Afghanistan
Rot & Ruin, Jonathan Mayberry (2010)
Zombies Fiction.
Survival Fiction.
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School — Alexandra Robbins (2011)
NonFiciton
The Night Circus-Erin Morgenstern (2011)
Fiction-Romance/Fantasy
Alex Award 2012
Between shades of gray- Ruta Sepetys (2011)
Horn Book starred
Historical fiction
Boys don't cry-Blackman, Malorie (2010)--The Guardian
Fiction
Annabel-Winter, Kathleen (2011)
Kirkus
Fiction
Gender issues
Canadian
Tiger's Wife-Obreht, Téa (2011)
Fiction
(several best books of the year lists)
Balkan
iBoy, Kevin Brooks (2010)
SF
Gangs fiction
Internet fiction
reluctant readers
British
Graffiti moon — Crowley, Cath (2011)
CBCA 2011 honor winnerArtists Fiction.
Graffiti Fiction.
Interpersonal relations Fiction.
Australia Fiction.
Karen Gockley
Robopocalypse : a novel / Daniel H. Wilson.(Alex Award 2012)
Archos, a powerful artificial intelligence, takes on the persona of a shy human boy and begins to take over the world's technology and turn it against humanity, launching a robot war that no one seems to be able to contain or stop.Graffiti moon — Crowley, Cath (2011)
CBCA 2011 honor winnerArtists Fiction.
Graffiti Fiction.
Interpersonal relations Fiction.
Australia Fiction.
SLJ: Gr 8 Up-This adventure, set in Australia, is one for the art crowd. Lucy, Jazz, and Daisy plan to celebrate graduation by staying out all night. And while they're at it, Lucy is determined to meet Shadow, a mysterious graffiti artist who has tagged the city with his soulful works. Jazz is set on finding Poet, Shadow's partner and the wordsmith of his wall art. Daisy just wants boyfriend Dylan to remember that it's her birthday. Dealing with his dyslexia by quitting school, Ed has lost his job in a paint store and is talked into robbing the art wing of the high school this particular night with Leo and Dylan. They decide to hang out with the girls until it's time for the heist. Ed takes Lucy on a search for Shadow and along the way they visit a number of his paintings around the city. Chapters that alternate between Lucy and Ed (who, unbeknownst to Lucy, is Shadow) rely heavily on art-themed metaphor to describe the encroaching darkness, city scenes, traffic lights, and impending dawn. Part gallery tour, part crime caper, and part romance, Graffiti Moon is an artsy spin on the common young adult theme of self-discovery. The references to artists and specific works may intimidate readers who have little related knowledge, but it might also nudge them to learn about Vermeer and others. The aesthetic tone of the story is punctuated with comic relief and some coarse language. While Lucy's and Ed's inner dialogues sometimes seem unrealistically metaphorical, readers will appreciate the original and sympathetic characters. A paint-covered thumbs up!-Karen Elliott, Grafton High School, WI
iBoy, Kevin Brooks (2011)
SF
Gangs fiction
Internet fiction
Kirkus Review starred (October 1, 2011)
Tom Harvey's world is upended after he's hit by a smartphone thrown from 30 stories up. Living with his grandmother in the projects known as Crow Town, a grim, sprawling urban jungle where drug-dealing gangs rule by intimidation, Tom keeps his head down and dreams of turning his childhood friendship with Lucy into something more. That life ends when, waking from surgery, he's told that parts of the iPhone fused with his brain and can't be removed. That fusion endows Tom with powers that give new meaning to "hacking." It feels exhilarating to apply his new powers to paying back a local gang that carried out a brutal sexual assault on Lucy, but revenge can't bridge the gulf between him and Lucy or heal her psychological wounds. Using his powers is changing Tom; he'd like to stop; yet against an unscrupulous enemy that's utterly amoral, don't his moral scruples amount to weakness? Those aiming to attract the elusive teen male to teen fiction have no better ally than English novelist Brooks, whose lean, suspenseful thrillers feature compelling heroes facing tough choices, and this is no exception (Being, 2007, etc.). This classic superhero plot, at once cutting-edge science fiction and moral fable, is guaranteed to keep even fiction-averse, reluctant readers on the edge of their seats. (Science fiction. 14 & up)
Rot & Ruin, Jonathan Mayberry (2010)
Zombies Fiction.
Survival Fiction.
Booklist (October 15, 2010 (Vol. 107, No. 4))
Grades 9-12. It’s been 14 years since First Night, when the dead came back to life. Six billion people have died (and reanimated) since then, and America has collapsed into isolated communities living within the great “Rot and Ruin.” Benny is 15, which means it’s time to get a job or face cut rations, but his general laziness leaves him with only one employment option: join his stuffy, sword-swinging, Japanese half-brother, Tom, as an apprentice bounty hunter. This means heading beyond the gates to slice and dice “zoms,” but Benny quickly begins to see the undead in a new light—as well as realizing that Tom is much more than he ever let on. The plot is driven by an evil bounty-hunter rival and the cruel games he plays, but Maberry has more than gore on his mind. The chief emotion here is sadness, and the book plays out like an extended elegy for a lost world. Tom’s a bit too perfect and his pontification too extended, but this is nevertheless an impressive mix of meaning and mayhem.The House of Silk – Anthony Horowitz (2012)
Crime & mystery
The first official new Sherlock Holmes mystery,
Washinton Post, Michael Dirda: ““The House of Silk” is an altogether terrific period thriller and one of the best Sherlockian pastiches of our time.”
Nadine Rosevear - February 15, 2012 - There Is no Dog- Meg Rosoff, 2011 Fantasy
Booklist starred (November 15, 2011 (Vol. 108, No. 6))
Grades 9-12. Have you ever wondered why there are earthquakes and hurricanes? Why plans fail and lovers break up? How an omnipotent deity lets evil occur in the world? Would it help if I told you God is a teenage boy? That’s the premise of Printz-winner Rosoff’s new novel. Long story short, Mona, the mother of Bob (aka God), wins Earth in a poker game. What mother doesn’t want to see her son get ahead? So Bob gets the job In the Beginning, but like so many teenage boys he often can’t see past his nether regions. And besides, he’s a bit thick and won’t buckle down, so fortunately the overworked Mr. B. has been designated as Bob’s companion/assistant. Think Arthur (Dudley Moore) and his butler (John Gielgud). Then Bob falls for Lucy, a beautiful zoo worker, and Mr. B. knows all hell is going to break loose. It happens every time Bob gets involved with a human. Wildly inventive and laugh-out-loud funny, the story is told from the points of view of various characters: long-suffering Mr. B., virginal Lucy, dingbat Mona, and, of course, petulant, powerful, pissant Bob. In many ways, the book’s parts add up to more than its sum, but it is not often that a book comes along that is both arch and thoughtful, silly and smart. This one’s not quite like anything else out there.
Karen Gockley, February 8, 2012 - The Boy Who Loved Batman: a memoir: the true story of how a comic book obsessed kid conquered Hollywood to bring the Dark Knight to the silver screen. Michael Uslan. 2011. BL - Comic book feel, childhood memories leading to making the Batman movies...
Science Fair Season: 12 kids, a robot named Scorch, and what it takes to win. Judy Dutton. 2011
The Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) has a top prize of $50,000, with a total of $4 million in prizes available to high-school students for their achievements in fields from physics to behavioral science. A baking soda volcano isn’t going to cut it. Not even drug-sniffing cockroaches make rank. Dutton profiles six promising students—including a horse trainer, a leper, and possibly the youngest nuclear physicists in the country—on the road to ISEF 2009 and discusses (to some extent, demystifying) the work of five hall-of-fame competitors in previous years. With warmth, wit, and a sense of awe, Dutton conveys the students’ dedication and curiosity, dissects their motivations, sifts through their pasts, and breaks down the science behind their innovations into plain, palatable English. As these kids strive for scholarships, take meetings with Homeland Security, and earn the ire of large corporations, it’s easy to forget that they’re teenagers. Science Fair Season humanizes them while inspiring and firing the imagination of readers along for the ride.
Kamchatka. Marcelo Figeuras. 2010
A novel that offers an adventure story about a young boy forced to square fantasy against reality.
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School by Alexandra Robbins, published by Hyperion (ISBN 9781401302023).
The fascinating psychology behind popularity and outsiderdom is illuminated through the roles of Popular Bitch, Gamer, Band Geek, and others. Being excluded doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you - outsiders often succeed.
Library JOURNAL:
VERDICT An excellent overview of the complex social environment of high school, told in an accessible and often humorous and touching manner. High school students as well as adults, especially those who are or were part of the "cafeteria fringe," will enjoy this book. Very highly recommended.-Mark Bay, Univ. of the Cumberlands Lib., Williamsburg, KY (c) Copyright 2011.
Starcrossed. Josephine Angelini. 2011 (with a sequel out in May)
The first time Helen sees Lucas Delos in her Nantucket high-school hallway, she wants to kill him—literally. The Three Furies that have haunted her dreams harass her until she attacks this gorgeous new guy on campus, an act that introduces her to the rest of the Delos family and gradually serves to unveil her multiple talents—superhuman strength, the ability to fly, and an electrical charge that packs a wallop—as well as an unknown enemy determined to kill her. In Angelini’s debut, based on the Greek myth of Helen of Troy, Helen’s true heritage and Lucas’ large, boisterous, and very dangerous extended family both come into play. Angelini weaves mythology and everyday high-school life into a tangled fantasy of star-crossed lovers. The riveting plot twists and turns as the myth’s destiny translates into present-day terrors, dreams, and hopelessness, and its execution is seamless. An intentionally less-than-satisfying ending will only prompt readers to hope for a sequel that reunites Helen, Lucas, and their bizarre yet fascinating families.
Truth or Dare: 21 tales of heartbreak and happiness.(Short Stories)
Perhaps the whole of life is like one big game of ‘Truth or Dare,’ says editor Miles in the introduction to this short story collection. The 21 fascinating tales dare to portray teens accurately and truthfully regardless of the consequences, and they run the gamut. From life and death to love and sex, both gay and straight; from parental neglect to best friend betrayal; from tweeting to the retelling of a Bible story—these stories will reach out to all teens. Popular or pariah, privileged or poor, readers will see themselves somewhere in this wide array of characters and situations. Both YA and adult writers are featured, including such well-known authors as Gary Soto, Ellen Wittlinger, and A. M. Holmes, as well as a few who are newly introduced (Heidi Kling and Sara Wilkinson). Together, they challenge teen readers to face and embrace life with all its triumphs and travails.
The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens (non-fiction)
Nadine Rosevear - February 6, 2012 - In the Sea there Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda - 2011 - biographical fiction
Booklist (July 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 21)
Based on a true story, Geda’s novel faithfully retells the torturous life of Afghan Enaiatollah—Enaiat—Akbari as, beginning at age 10, he proceeds from one dire situation to another in hopes of finding a new life free from Taliban rule. His plight is briskly as well as briefly told, yet in it there’s no shortage of heart-breaking trials to be faced as Enaiat journeys through Pakistan and Iran to Turkey and Greece before finding political asylum in Italy when he is 15. On one page he’s doing back-breaking labor to repay debts, and on the next he’s spending days inside the false bottom of a truck dangerously crossing a border. Throughout, firing AK-47s boom and blast. Enaiat’s daring adventure is ideally suited for young adults, but older readers will find in it a deeper layer of investigation of the humanity of strangers and the power of family. If Enaiat’s memory eventually seems muddled and fragmented, so that the book must be called fiction, the truth of his experience remains.
Gourley-24 Jan 2012--The Night Circus- Erin Morgenstern (2011)
Fiction-Romance-Fantasy
Alex Award 2012
Booklist starred (May 15, 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 18))
This big and—no, not bulky—compelling first novel ushers in a menacing tone with its first sentence: The circus arrives without warning. Why would a circus arrive so quietly in town, and why would anyone need warning about this particular one? The time span here is 30 years, from 1873 to 1903, and the settings range from America to Europe. To a famous magician is delivered a little girl who, as it turns out, is his child, and fortunately for his future, she is possessed of magical powers. As it also happens, this magician has an archrival, who, in the face of the first magician’s jackpot in the form of his little girl, seeks a young person for him to train to rival her. What the two magicians did not anticipate, as the years pass and the two young people, the girl and the boy whom the second magician found, are honed in their specialty for performance’s sake and to outplay the other one, is that the young persons, when of an age, would meet and, surprising or not to the reader, fall in love. How will their destiny play out now? With appeal for readers not particularly geared to fantasy but who plainly enjoy an unusual and well-drawn story, this one will make a good crossover suggestion.
Gourley-24 Jan 2012--Why we broke up : novel- Daniel Handler ; art by Maira Kalman (2011)
Fiction-Romance
Printz honor 2012
Booklist starred (November 1, 2011 (Vol. 108, No. 5))
Grades 9-12. This novel may sound like another tale of boy meets girl, but, folks, it’s all in the delivery. In faltering pitter-patter dialogue and thick, gushy, grasping-for-words paragraphs, Handler takes a tired old saw, the romance between senior basketball cocaptain Ed Slaterton and junior cinephile Min Green, and injects us into the halting, breathless, disbelieving, horny, and nervous minds of two teens who feel “different” only in how they define themselves in contrast to each other—that dumbstruck, anthropological joy of introducing foreign films to a dude schooled only in layups, and vice versa. The story is told from Min’s perspective, a bittersweet diatribe of their breakup arranged around objects (a matchbox, a bottle cap, a dish towel, an—ahem—condom wrapper) of varying importance that she intends on returning to him. (Kalman’s full-color drawings of these objects were not available for review.) It is fitting that the chapters center upon these items; the story itself feels like blurry photos, snippets of stray recordings—all the more powerful because of how they evoke truth more than any mere relaying of facts. Yes, the relationship breaks apart like a predictable song, but Handler’s genius is to make us hear those minor-key notes as if they were playing on our first—and last—dates, too. In the mood to break additional hearts? Pair this with Pete Hautman’s The Big Crunch (2011). HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Yes, Handler is mostly known to the younger set as Mr. Snicket, but this effort finds the perfect spot between his youth and adult novels, a fact born out by the high-caliber promotional plans.Gourley-24 Jan 2012-Where Things Come Back- John Corey Whaley (2011)
William C. Morris Award 2012; Printz 2012
Fiction
Booklist (July 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 21))
Grades 9-12. An answer to complaints about simplistic YA problem fiction, this debut novel, set in Lily, Arkansas, takes on the whole small town with alternating viewpoints, beginning with the first-person narrative of Cullen, 17, and moving on to a huge cast of friends, enemies, family members, lovers, and neighbors. In a parallel plotline, Benton, 18, fails as a missionary in Ethiopia (“passing out food, water, and Christ”) and, after returning to college in the U.S., commits suicide, setting off a chain of interconnected, unexpected events. What will hold readers most is the moving story of Cullen’s beloved younger brother, who suddenly goes missing, leading to mystery, heartbreak, and an astonishing resolution on the very last page. Whaley’s numerous themes range from religion to Internet technology to the environment, and a wry subplot about the so-called sighting of a long-extinct Lazarus woodpecker brings levity, as Lily’s residents try to capitalize on the new tourist trade with creations such as the “Lazarus burger.” An intriguing, memorable offering teens will want to discuss.
cindycolson-20 Jan 2012-Boys don't cry-Blackman, Malorie (2011)--The Guardian
Fiction
It's a striking opening: Dante is waiting for his A-level results to arrive in the post, but what he gets instead is an ex-girlfriend on the doorstop with a baby she says is his. One event offers him a future at university; the other, since the mother is about to dump the baby on him, leads to the death of all his dreams.
It's an immensely readable book, as you would expect from Malorie Blackman, and the account of how Dante comes to terms with fatherhood and his responsibilities is genuinely moving, while staying on the right side of sentimentality. Along the way he also accepts his brother's orientation, though at a terrible cost.
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-Blue Nights-Didion, Joan (2011)--Entertainment Weekly
Nonfiction (essays)
There is no magical thinking left at all, not a shred of it, in Blue Nights, Didion's ragged and self-pitiless slog back into the bowels of loss in memory of her daughter. ''The way I write is who I am, or have become,'' Didion explained in Magical Thinking, an exquisitely chiseled book built with passion and shaped by the author's raw need to keep up momentum as an escape hatch from grief. Now, in Blue Nights, she writes as a woman aged and broken by what she has endured these past several years. Her energy is gone. Her language, while still that distinctive Didion incantation of self-absorption and piercing perception, is variable. Her attention wanders from the memory of bridal flowers in Quintana's hair to reminiscences about fancy dinner plates in the home of fancy friends. To say that Blue Nights has little of Magical Thinking's polish is to state a fascinating, telling fact, not to offer a criticism. What wafts off the pages of this haunting memento mori are undistilled, profoundly human expressions of fatigue, fear, dignity, regret, and vulnerability that are almost — but not quite — under the author's control.--Lisa Schwarzbaum
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-The Sense of an Ending- Barnes, Julian (2011)--Guardian
2011 Man Booker Prize Winner
Fiction
Like so many of Barnes's narrators, Tony Webster is resigned to his ordinariness; even satisfied with it, in a bloody-minded way. In one light, his life has been a success: a career followed by comfortable retirement, an amiable marriage followed by amicable divorce, a child seen safely into her own domestic security. On harsher inspection, "I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was." Barnes is brutally incisive on the diminishments of age: now that the sense of his own ending is coming into focus, Tony apprehends that "the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss", that he has already experienced the first death: that of the possibility of change. But like all of us, he has carried his youth inside him into adulthood, fixed in vivid memory. Looming largest in his personal mythology is his brilliant, tragic, Camus-reading schoolfriend Adrian (another echo ofNothing to Be Frightened Of here: in that book Barnes remembers a similar friend by the fitting but unlikely name of Alex Brilliant). It is a solicitor's letter informing him that, 40 years on, he has been left Adrian's diary in a will, that sets Tony to examining what he thinks his life has been.--Justine Jordan
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-Annabel-Winter, Kathleen (2011)--Kirkus
Fiction
In a remote coastal town in Newfoundland in the 1970s, a young person of mixed gender struggles for identity, acceptance and understanding. Joining a select group of novels including Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex (2002) and Alan Friedman's Hermaphrodeity (1972), Winter's affecting first novel is the story of Wayne Blake, who is subjected to special corrective surgery as a newborn, raised as a boy and given injections and hormone pills to maintain his masculine traits. His mother, Jacinta, a cosmopolitan-minded outsider from the city of St. John's, is torn over quashing his female qualities and interests but wants even less to go against the wishes of his closed-off father, Treadway, a trapper away for months at a time. The Montreal-based Winter, a native of Newfoundland, possesses a rare blend of lyrical brilliance, descriptive power and psychological and philosophical insight. Her way with fate and sadness recalls The World According to Garp, without the cute irony. A compelling, gracefully written novel about mixed gender that sheds insight as surely as it rejects sensationalism. This book announces the arrival of a major writer.
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-Cat's Table-Ondaatje, Michael (2011)--New York Times
Fiction
In “The Cat’s Table,” Ondaatje seems to lead the reader on a journey through three deeply submerged weeks in his own memory — from the year 1954, when, at age 11, he traveled on the ocean liner Oronsay from Colombo, in what was then Ceylon, to England, a passage that would lead him from his past to his future self. As the novel opens, prominent passengers are granted seats at the captain’s table, but young Michael (nicknamed Mynah) and the two boys he befriends, Cassius (a troublemaker) and Ramadhin (a contemplative asthmatic), are relegated to a table of dubious characters: a mute tailor, a retired ship dismantler, a pianist who has “hit the skids,” a botanist and a lady who hides pigeons in the pockets of her jacket, and reads thrillers in her deck chair, flinging them overboard when they bore her.... Not all the mysteries Ondaatje explores in his account of Mynah’s sea passage — revisited in adulthood from the remove of decades and from another continent — have clear resolutions, nor do they need them. Uncertainty, Ondaatje shows, is the unavoidable human condition, the gel that changes the light on the lens, altering but not spoiling the image.--Liesl Schillinger
Surridge-12 Jan 2012-Half-Blood Blues-Edugyan, Esi (2011)--Globe and Mail
Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta to Ghanaian immigrant parents
Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction (Canadian--2011)
Historical fiction
Set in Baltimore, Berlin and Paris,Half-Blood Blues spans from just after the Great War to the 1990s, but centres on the months leading up to the occupation of Paris. It chronicles the increasingly deadly trials of an interracial jazz band in which the lead musician, a German of African descent, is arrested by the Nazis.
Half-Blood Blues can be compared to a jazz symphony with discrete movements, shifting moods and a complex chorus of human and instrumental voices: It swings between present and past, North and South, East and West, black and white, art and violence, war and peace.--Donna Bailey Nurse
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Tiger's Wife-Obreht, Téa (2011)
born in 1985 in the former Yugoslavia, and spent her childhood in Cyprus and Egypt before eventually immigrating to the United States
-Booklist
Fiction
Not even Obreht’s place on the New Yorker’s current “20 under 40” list of exceptional writers will prepare readers for the transporting richness and surprise of this gripping novel of legends and loss in a broken land. Drawing on the former Yugoslavia’s fabled past and recent bloodshed, Belgrade-born Obreht portrays two besieged doctors. Natalia is on an ill-advised “good will” medical mission at an orphanage on what is suddenly the “other side,” now that war has broken out, when she learns that her grandfather, a distinguished doctor forced out of his practice by ethnic divides, has died far from home. She is beset by memories, particularly of her grandfather taking her to the zoo to see the tigers. We learn the source of his fascination in mesmerizing flashbacks, meeting the village butcher, the deaf-mute Muslim woman he married, and a tiger who escaped the city zoo after it was bombed by the Germans. Of equal mythic mystery is the story of the “deathless man.” Moments of breathtaking magic, wildness, and beauty are paired with chilling episodes in which superstition overrides reason; fear and hatred smother compassion; and inexplicable horror rules. Every word, every scene, every thought is blazingly alive in this many-faceted, spellbinding, and rending novel of death, succor, and remembrance. — Donna Seaman
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-The Tiger--Vaillant, John (2010)
-Booklist
NonFiction
Set in Russia’s Maritime Territory, Vaillant’s story concerns a tiger of the endangered Amur subspecies that killed three hunters in 1997. Expanding from the incidents’ central facts, Vaillant’s narrative explores humans’ relationship with predatory animals in general, with the Amur tiger as the specific example. Literary, folkloric, and scientific sources combine into a deeply sensitive depiction of the tiger’s adaptation to its forested, mountainous, and wintry environment. As he recounts how Russians such as the hunters in question also attempt to extract a living from the taiga, possibly including illegal poaching of the tiger, Vaillant posits the tiger’s thoughts about the competition, inferring its intelligence from a conservation warden’s investigation into the cases of the unfortunate hunters, who were felled in ambush-style attacks. Interest in Vaillant’s work, which climaxes in the warden’s pursuit of the deadly tiger, will partake of humans’ instinctual fear of large carnivores, the modern imperative to preserve them from extinction, and readers of Vaillant’s //The Golden Spruce// (2005), a positively reviewed, deep-drilling work, also about the nexus between humans and the natural world. — Gilbert Taylor
I have read both of the above and highly recommend--see blog post:
http://blogs.wab.edu/greensky/2011/12/13/lao-hu/
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-The Revolver--Sedgwick, Marcus (2010)
a British author and illustrator as well as a musician.
-Booklist
Historical-Mystery Fiction
Grades 7-10. Sedgwick’s historical mystery, set in the Arctic Circle in 1899 and 1910, makes good use of the word chilling. Outside their remote Scandinavian village, Sig’s father dies of exposure after trying to rush home across a frozen lake. The reason for his carelessness becomes apparent to Sig when a hulking beast of a man arrives at their tiny shack with a Colt revolver, demanding his share of a stolen wealth of gold. But Sig has his own Colt hidden in the storeroom, and some very pressing questions. Who is this brute at the door? Is there really a hidden treasure? And, most importantly, can he bring himself to use that revolver to save himself and his family? As the claustrophobic tension in the Arctic cabin mounts, Sedgwick doles out bits of backstory set a decade earlier in the Alaska gold rush, and the climax reveals that there hasn’t been a single superfluous detail in the intricate, freezer-burn buildup. A carefully crafted story effectively rigidified by taut plotting and the crystalline atmospherics of its isolated setting.
— Ian Chipman
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Between shades of gray-Sepetys, Ruta (2011)
-Horn Book starred
Historical fiction
In 1939, the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic nations, which then disappeared from maps, not to reappear until 1990. Teachers, librarians, musicians, artists, writers, business owners, doctors, lawyers, and servicemen were considered anti-Soviet and sent into exile. Esther Hautzig told this story in her seminal 1968 memoir The Endless Steppe; Sepetys's even starker novel is more extreme in its depiction of deprivation and suffering. When in June 1941 the Soviet secret police show up at fifteen-year-old Lina Vilkas's Lithuania home and throw Lina, her younger brother, and their mother onto a train, a decade-long nightmare begins. "Like matchsticks in a small box," forty-six people were crammed into their car, "a cage on wheels, maybe a rolling coffin" bound for the vast nothingness of Siberia. So begins a human drama calling forth the best and worst of human behaviors -- courage, anger, fear, confusion, little kindnesses, and egregious selfishness. The bald man with the broken leg whines and complains, while the librarian organizes the children and tells stories, and all along the way Lina's mother keeps her family together. Sepetys creates complicated characters: there's more to the bald man than whining and complaining, and the young NKVD guard Nikolai proves not to be the monster Lina considers him. Two excellent maps and an informative author's note round out a haunting chronicle, demonstrating that even in the heart of darkness "love is the most powerful army." dean Schneider
Gourley- 9 Jan 2012-Blink & Caution-Wynne-Jones, Tim (2011)
English–Canadian author
Horn Book (March/April, 2011)
Crime Fiction
"It's as if you always knew something like this would happen to you one day...You'd stumble on to something, and instead of running away from it, you'd pick it up and run with it, follow it to the end." While lurking in a Toronto hotel hallway, hunting for room-service remains to eat for breakfast, a street kid who calls himself Blink happens upon a high-profile kidnapping in progress -- or is it a fake kidnapping in progress? Blink's story, told in compelling second-person narration, alternates and then intersects with that of another runaway, Caution -- "She was the one who came up with the name Caution for herself. Caution, as in Slippery When Wet...Caution, as in Toxic." Both teens have opted for the gritty life of the streets over trouble at home. (Blink is running from domestic violence; Caution from guilt over an accidental shooting death.) Though it loses focus in the end, the crime-drama element of the novel, involving a dispute over corporate uranium mining on Indian-owned land, has enough suspense and action to keep readers interested while they forge a connection with the main characters, whose relationship deepens as they help each other survive immediate dangers as well as the aftereffects of past trauma. christine m. heppermann
Gourley-9 Jan 2011-Chime-Billingsley, Franny (2011)
Booklist starred (February 1, 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 11))
Supernatural Fiction
Grades 8-12. Since her stepmother’s recent death, 17-year-old Briony Larkin knows that if she can keep two secrets—that she is a witch and that she is responsible for the accident that left Rose, her identical twin, mentally compromised—and remember to hate herself always, no other harm will befall her family in their Swampsea parsonage at the beginning of the twentieth century. The arrival of Mr. Clayborne, a city engineer, and his university-dropout son, Eldric, makes Briony’s task difficult. Clayborne’s plan to drain the swamp has made the Old Ones unhappy, particularly the Boggy Mun, who has plagued the village’s children with swamp cough in retaliation. When Rose’s lingering illness turns into a cough, Briony knows that she must do whatever it takes, even revealing her secrets, to save her sister. While thwarting the advances of an arsenic-addicted suitor, Briony must also deny her feelings for Eldric, even as he helps her solve the puzzle that has become her life. Exploring the powers of guilt and redemption, Billingsley (The Folk Keeper, 1999) has crafted a dark, chilling yet stunning world. Briony’s many mysteries and occasional sardonic wit make her a force to be reckoned with. Exquisite to the final word.
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Paper covers rock-by Hubbard, Jenny (2011)
Booklist starred (July 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 21)
FictionGrades 9-12. At the beginning of his junior year of high school, Alex loses a good friend to an accidental—and drunken—death, and by the end of that first semester, he has lost his moral innocence as well. After Alex’s friend dies, he retreats emotionally while also allowing his new, young, and pretty English teacher to coax out his poetic abilities. Meanwhile, Glenn, another student and former friend, tortures Alex with doubts about Alex’s own motives related to both the dead boy and the English teacher, encouraging Alex to question his very self. Although Alex knows that his admiration for the teacher is fanciful and not connected to the fact that she may have witnessed certain events related to the death, he recognizes that he is socially outclassed by the powerful Glenn. Can Alex muster the will to counter Glenn's manipulations to oust the teacher? Both plotting and characters are thoroughly crafted in this stellar first novel. The poetry that Hubbard produces from Alex’s pen is brilliant, and the prose throughout is elegant in its simplicity. Although the novel takes place in the early 1980s, it could indeed unfold at almost any time, and its boarding-school setting is specific yet accessible to readers in any school setting. Reminiscent of John Knowles’ classic coming-of-age story, A Separate Peace (1959), this novel introduces Hubbard as a bright light to watch on the YA literary scene.
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Anya's ghost--Brosgol, Vera (2011)
(born August 1984 in Russia) is a cartoonist and a graduate in Classical Animation of Sheridan College in Canada. She lives in Portland, Oregon
Booklist starred (March 15, 2011 (Vol. 107, No. 14))
Graphic NovelGrades 7-12. Like Hope Larson’s Mercury (2010), Brosgol’s spooky, polished debut offers something that’s still too rare in comics: a realistic, contemporary teenage girl’s story. Growing up with her single Russian mother and younger brother, Anya works hard to fit in, and she distances herself from nerdy, heavily accented Dima, another Russian immigrant at her school. On a shortcut to school, Anya tumbles into a well, where a pile of bones swirls into the visible ghost of a young girl, Emily. When Anya is rescued, Emily comes along and becomes a constant companion, helping Anya cheat on tests and talk to crushes. With expert pacing and detail, Brosgol perfectly calibrates the subtle shifts from Anya and Emily’s sunny, BFF bonding into the nightmarish reality that Emily has a terrifying agenda. Working in a clean-lined, cartoon style and an appropriately moody, bruiselike palette of purples and blacks, Brosgol uses clever panel arrangements and shifting close-up and aerial perspectives to amplify the action and emotion, from Anya’s initial elation to her primal terror. The story of a teen who worries about appearing “fresh off the boat” makes this a natural companion to Gene Luen Yang’s Printz Award winner, American Born Chinese (2006), and the contrast between everyday high-school concerns and supernatural horror add even further, broad appeal. New fans will hope for more from this talented newcomer.
Gourley-9 Jan 2012-Feynman-Ottaviani, Jim
Horn Book (September/October, 2011)
Graphic Novel-BiographyRichard Feynman was a brilliant theoretical physicist and an individualist of the first order. He worked at Los Alamos on the atomic bomb and won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics; yet he spent two years designing and teaching a freshman physics course at Caltech and turned down staggeringly lucrative offers from rival universities because the money, he said, would "make me unhappy, and I wouldn't be able to do any physics." He was married three times; played the frigideira in a samba band in Brazil; studied art; hung out at topless bars and at Esalen. Everything he did, he did with exuberance and a sense of play. The first-person graphic novel format is ideal for telling Feynman's story. We witness young Feynman struggling with mathematical concepts until he begins to see them in 3D. Feynman talks about his affinity for women, but we hardly need to be told: in panel after panel we see him noticing them, or watch a scene through his eyes in which the women are vividly drawn while the men fade to invisibility. Ottaviani and Myrick do a spectacular job presenting their remarkable subject -- achieving a kind of Vulcan mind-meld with Feynman, we come to know him so well -- even unto clear explanations of complex physics. Their enthusiasm infuses every aspect of the book, from the riveting opening scene of Feynman lecturing while a weighted pendulum whooshes toward his head to the aptly spirited and opinionated bibliography. martha v. parravano
Gourley-9 Jan 2012- Swamplandia! -- Russell, Karen (2011)
Booklist starred (October 15, 2010 (Vol. 107, No. 4))
FictionRussell’s lavishly imagined and spectacularly crafted first novel sprang from a story in her highly praised collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006). Swamplandia! is a shabby tourist attraction deep in the Everglades, owned by the Bigtree clan of alligator wrestlers. When Hilola, their star performer, dies, her husband and children lose their moorings, and Swamplandia! itself is endangered as audiences dwindle. The Chief leaves. Brother Kiwi, 17, sneaks off to work at the World of Darkness, a new mainland amusement park featuring the “rings of hell.” Otherworldly sister Osceola, 16, vanishes after falling in love with the ghost of a young man who died while working for the ill-fated Dredge and Fill Campaign in the 1930s. It’s up to Ava, 13, to find her sister, and her odyssey to the Underworld is mythic, spellbinding, and terrifying. Russell’s powers reside in her profound knowledge of the great imperiled swamp, from its alligators and insects, floating orchids and invasive “strangler” melaleuca trees to the tragic history of its massacred indigenous people and wildlife. Ravishing, elegiac, funny, and brilliantly inquisitive, Russell’s archetypal swamp saga tells a mystical yet rooted tale of three innocents who come of age through trials of water, fire, and air.